AWARDS
WINNER Europe’s Best Independent Film, ECU European Independent Film Festival (Paris, France) 2010
95-year old Irma Miko, a cultured and accomplished member of Europe’s intelligentsia, is a woman with a past. Born in Czernowitz, Romania, in 1914, Irma joined a Revolutionary political group at University at age 16 and was arrested along with 55 of her comrades by age 19. A Jew and a Communist, Irma joined the French Resistance in Paris in 1941. Her unimaginably dangerous assignment was to approach occupying German soldiers and persuade them to join the Resistance.
In 2008, together with her son André, Irma set out on an emotional journey across Europe in search of her past and her old companions. The result is a poetic and deeply moving account of a vanishing world and a portrait of an extraordinary, brave woman who risked everything during one of the darkest chapters in history.
Irma is one the few remaining witness to life in the former city of Czernowitz, a vibrant community of 50,00 Jews (one-third of the town’s population) that give birth to countless Jewish writers, poets and scholars. She provides rare reportage of illegal Communist activities in 1930s Bucharest, and offers a direct connection to the Spanish Civil War, for which both her first and second husband fought. With the Stalinist purges, a disillusioned Irma cut all ties to the Communist Party.
French-Israeli director Yonathan Levy’s cinematically creative approach to storytelling, which includes photo projections and theatrical set pieces performed by Irma’s granddaughter Sarah, bring Irma’s memories to life. The film won Europe’s Best Independent Film Award at the ECU Film Festival, Paris.
Interview with Levy upon winning Best Film at ECU Film Festival
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